AFS Leadership
Current Officers and Committee Chairs
President
C. Kurt Dewhurst (Michigan State University, East Lansing)
Past President
Elaine Lawless (University of Missouri, Columbia)
Executive Board
Terms ending after 2010
Timothy H. Evans (Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green)
Carl Lindahl (University of Houston, Houston, Texas)
Marsha MacDowell (Michigan State University Museum, East Lansing)
Terms ending after 2011
Amy Shuman (The Ohio State University, Columbus)
Amy Skillman (Institute for Cultural Partnerships, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania)
William Westerman (Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey)
Terms ending after 2012
Ray Cashman (The Ohio State University, Columbus)
Jason Baird Jackson (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Rachelle Saltzman (Iowa Arts Council, Des Moines)
Marilyn White (Kean University, Union, New Jersey)
Executive Director
Timothy Lloyd
Associate Director
Lorraine Walsh Cashman
Committee on International Issues
Lee Haring (Brooklyn College, emeritus), Chair
Cultural Diversity Task Force
Marilyn White (Kean University, Union, New Jersey), Chair
Membership Committee
Margaret R. Yocom (George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia), Chair
Nominating Committee
Juwen Zhang (Willamette University, Salem, Oregon), Chair
Publications Committee
Judy McCulloh (University of Illinois Press, Champaign), Chair
American Council of Learned Societies Delegate
Lee Haring (Brooklyn College, emeritus)
UNESCO Representative
Timothy Lloyd
World Intellectual Property Organization Delegate
Sandy Rikoon (University of Missouri, Columbia)
AFS Archivist
Randy Williams (Utah State University, Logan)
Current American Folklore Society President
C. Kurt Dewhurst (AFS President, 2010-2011)
C. Kurt Dewhurst, PhD, serves as the Director of Arts and Cultural Initiatives, and Senior Fellow, University Outreach and Engagement, at Michigan State University, where he also serves as Curator of Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the University's Museum and as Professor of English. He is the author or co-author of: Artists in Aprons: The Folk Arts of American Women; Religious Folk Art in America; Michigan Folk Art: Its Beginnings to 1941; Rainbows in the Sky: The Folk Arts of Michigan in the 20th Century; Traditions at Work: Grand Ledge Folk Pottery; Michigan Hmong Arts; MSU Campus: Buildings, Spaces, Places, and co-editor of the Michigan Folklife Reader and To Honor and Comfort: Native Quilting Traditions. He is co-editor of forthcoming publication Michiganders: Michigan Folk Traditions. He has also curated over fifty museum exhibitions and festival programs.
His research interests include folk arts, material culture, ethnicity, occupational folk culture, and arts and cultural heritage policy. As a Professor in the English Department at MSU, he teaches courses in folklife, material folk culture, and museum studies. He is a past recipient of a Fulbright Grant to work in Thailand with the National Culture Commission of Thailand and participated in a French-American Foundation Arts Administrators Exchange Program in France. He was honored with the 2004 Américo Paredes prize by the American Folklore Society (with Marsha MacDowell) for excellence in integrating scholarship with engagement with communities. Most recently he has coordinated a major national cultural heritage training program in South Africa; co-curated the Carriers of Culture: Native Basket Traditions festival program for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival; and co-curated a major international exhibition entitled Dear Mr. Mandela, Dear Mrs. Parks: Children's Letters, Global Lessons in South Africa and the US.
Recent Presidents of The American Folklore Society
Elaine Lawless (AFS President, 2008-2009)
Elaine Lawless, who received her PhD in folklore from Indiana University, is Professor of English at the University of Missouri. She is the author of five books, as well as many scholarly articles and is the co-producer (with Elizabeth Peterson)
of the documentary film on Pentecostalism, "Joy Unspeakable." At the University of Missouri she has received the Faculty
Alumni Award, the Kemper Award for Excellence in Teaching, a Gold Chalk Award (for graduate instruction) and a Purple Chalk Award
(for undergraduate instruction), and the Chancellor's Award for Research.
In 2002, she was named a Curators' Professor by the
MU Board of Curators; in 2004, she was named MU Alumni Distinguished Professor. In 2003, she founded and is the producer of the
Troubling Violence Performance Project, with Professor Heather Carver (director) of the MU Theatre Department. In fall 2005, the university also appointed Lawless to serve as director of its Center for Arts and Humanities.
Bill Ivey (AFS President, 2006-2007)
Bill Ivey is the Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, an arts policy research center
with offices in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, DC. He also serves as Senior Consultant to Leadership Music, a music industry professional
development program, and chairs the board of the National Recording Preservation Foundation, a federally-chartered foundation affiliated with
the Library of Congress.
From May, 1998 through September, 2001, Ivey served as the seventh Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal cultural agency.
Following years of controversy and significant budget cuts, Ivey's leadership is credited with restoring Congressional confidence in the work
of the NEA. Ivey's Challenge America Initiative, launched in 1999, has to date garnered more than $19 million in new Congressional appropriations
for the Arts Endowment.
Prior to government service, Ivey was director of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, Tennessee. He was twice elected board chairman of
the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Ivey holds degrees in folklore, history, and ethnomusicology, as well as honorary doctorates
from the University of Michigan, Michigan Technological University, Wayne State University, and Indiana University. He is a four-time Grammy
Award nominee (Best Album Notes category), and is the author of numerous articles on US cultural policy and folk and popular music.
His newest book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, was published by the University of California Press in 2008.
Michael Owen Jones (AFS President, 2004-2005)
Jones holds degrees in history, art,
international relations, folklore studies, and American studies. A member of the UCLA faculty since 1968, he has taught
courses on folk medicine, art, food customs and symbolism, vernacular religion, narrative analysis, fieldwork,
folklore theories and methods, and tradition and the individual. For 12 years he directed a research center and
archives and then chaired a teaching program. He has organized conferences on cultural diversity in the classroom,
urban folklore, and organizational culture and symbolism.
Jones has served on the Board of Directors of the California
Council for the Humanities, the Los Angeles Folk and Traditional Arts Program, and the American Folklore Society.
He has undertaken major research projects on African American storefront churches in Los Angeles, Ukrainian icon
painters in Canada, craftsmen in southeastern Kentucky, and Latino herbal medicine in Los Angeles.
Among his publications are
Why Faith Healing?, People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork, The Handmade Object and Its Maker,
The World of the Kalevala, Craftsman of the Cumberlands: Tradition and Creativity, Inside Organizations,
Exploring Folk Art, Putting Folklore to Use, Folkloristics: An Introduction, and Studying Organizational
Symbolism.
Jones has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine, and the
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He is a Folklore Fellow in the Finnish Academy of Science
and Letters and a Fellow of the American Folklore Society.
Jack Santino (AFS President, 2002-2003)
Jack Santino received the M.A. and the Ph.D. degrees in Folklore
and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. While still a
graduate student he began work at the Smithsonian Institution’s
folklife program, where he remained for nine years. There he was
a program coordinator for a variety of different presentations
at the annual Festival of American Folklife on the National Mall,
including Pullman porters and many different occupational groups.
He coordinated the "Folk Medicine: Herbalists, Curers, and Healers"
program for the National Museum of American History, and the Living
Celebration series held in the Renwick Gallery. In 1983 he joined
the faculty of the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green
State University in Ohio, where he is currently a professor of
folklore and popular culture.
He has worked on ethnographic films such as the multiple Emmy
Award-winning Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: The Story
of the Black Pullman Porter. He has published scholarly
articles in all major folklore journals, as well as American
Anthropologist and Natural History magazine. He is
the author or editor of six books, including most recently Signs
of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Public Use of Symbols
in Northern Ireland. From 1996 to 2000 he was the editor
of the Journal of American Folklore.
In 1992-1993, Santino conducted field research in Northern Ireland
with the aid of a Fullbright Research Fellowship and a British
Council Attachment to the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. In
2000 he was a guest professor at the Institute for North American
Studies at the University of Alcalá, Spain.
Santino’s research interests include the celebration of
American holidays and festivals; emergent rituals of death and
politics, such as spontaneous shrines and public death memorialization;
and the creative reinvention of ritual. He coordinates an annual
conference on Holidays, Ritual, Festival, Celebration, and Public
Display at Bowling Green State University.
Peggy A. Bulger (AFS President, 2001)
Peggy A. Bulger is director of the American Folklife Center at
the Library of Congress, the second person to hold that position
since the U.S. Congress created the Center in 1976. A native of
New York State, she holds a B.A. in fine arts from the State University
of New York at Albany, an M.A. in folk studies from Western Kentucky
University, and a Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University
of Pennsylvania. A folklorist, consultant, and producer, Bulger
has been documenting folklife and developing and managing folklife
programs for more than twenty-five years. She has been Florida
State Folk Arts Coordinator (1976-79), Florida Folklife Programs
Administrator (1979-89), and Program Coordinator, Director, and
Senior Officer for the Southern Arts Federation (1989-99).
Bulger is the author of South Florida Folklife, with Tina
Bucuvalas and Stetson Kennedy, (1994) and the editor of Musical
Roots of the South (1992). She is the producer of many videos,
including Music Masters & Rhythm Kings (1993), Every
Island Has Its Own Songs: The Tsimouris Family of Tarpon Springs
(1988), Fishing All My Days: Maritime Traditions of Florida’s
Shrimpers (1985); and a number of recordings, including Deep
South Musical Roots Tour (1992) and Drop On Down in Florida
(1981). She is a member of a number of professional organizations,
including the New York, Kentucky, and Florida folklore societies,
and she served as president of the American Folklore Society (2001).
Jo Radner (AFS President, 1999-2000)
Jo Radner received her Ph.D. in Celtic Languages and Literature
at Harvard University in 1971, and since then has taught Celtic
studies, folklore, American studies, literature, women’s
studies, and creative storytelling at American University in Washington,
DC.
Her research areas include oral narrative, feminist folklore,
early Irish and Welsh literature and historiography, modern Irish
and Scottish folklore, the contemporary storytelling movement,
and the rural culture and history of nineteenth-century northern
New England–all interconnected by a fascination with narrative
and performance that also leads her to create and perform her
own original stories. She is past president of the Celtic Studies
Association of North America and the Washington Storytellers Theatre,
a co-founder of the Middle Atlantic Folklife Association, and
currently a member of the Board of Directors of the National Storytelling
Network. Her publications include Feminist Messages: Coding
in Women’s Folk Culture (University of Illinois Press,
1993).
Strongly attached to her family’s home region of western
Maine and eager to develop new careers in folklore and applied
storytelling, Jo is moving out of academic life to live and work
in New England as an independent folklorist, storyteller, writer
and researcher. Aided by a Mellon Fellowship at the American Antiquarian
Society, she is finishing a book on the creation and performance
of handwritten literary "newspapers" in nineteenth-century
New England. She also conducts fieldwork in Maine, and continues
to develop and perform stories relating to New England life and
history (including current research on Rogers’ Rangers, the
eighteenth-century Indian fighters, and on the Western Abenaki).
AFS Executive Director
Timothy Lloyd has served as the executive director of the American Folklore Society since 2001. His office
is located at The Ohio State University in Columbus, where he serves as Adjunct Associate Professor of
English.
Before coming to the Society, Lloyd served as executive director
of Cityfolk, a nationally recognized folk arts organization located
in Dayton, Ohio. Earlier still, he was assistant director of the
American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, before which
he served for 14 years as director of folk arts programs for the
Ohio Arts Council. He began his career as a staff folklorist for
the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural
Heritage.
Lloyd received his PhD in American studies
from The George Washington University. He has taught folklore at Colorado College, The George Washington
University, The Ohio State University, and Utah State University. His research interests include American
foodways, occupational culture, and the history of public practice in the field of folklore. He has published articles and reviews in the major American
folklore journals, and co-authored Lake Erie Fishermen: Work, Identity and Tradition (University of
Illinois Press), named the best maritime history book of 1990 by the North American Society for Oceanic
History.
Lloyd has served as a board and committee member or consultant for many organizations,
including the French-American Foundation, the Fund for Folk Culture, the Michigan Council on the Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Michigan
State University Museum, the Ministry of Culture and Communication of the Republic of France, the National Council for the Traditional Arts, the National Endowments for the
Arts and Humanities, the National Recordings Preservation Board, the Ohio Arts Council, the Ohio Humanities Council, the Ohio State
University Libraries, and the Smithsonian Institution. He represents the AFS within the American Council
of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Alliance. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Literature, History, and Philosophy of Shandong University
in Ji'nan, China.
AFS Associate Director
Lorraine Walsh Cashman began work as associate director of the American Folklore Society in April 2009.
Formerly, she served as multimedia editor of web-based curricular material for the Agency for Instructional Technology in Bloomington, Indiana, and managing editor of The Information Society, a quarterly journal publishing research in social informatics. Earlier, she was the editorial associate at the Center for Foreign Policy Development of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
Cashman received her BA in English and anthropology magna cum laude from Brown University (1988). She received her MA in English with a minor in folklore from Indiana University (1996), concentrating on narrative and genre theory and the relationships between folklore and literature. She also earned an MIS in Information Science (2000) from Indiana University, focusing on computer-mediated communication and instructional technology.
Cashman also taught introductory writing and literature classes at Indiana University, and is a lecturer for The Ohio State University Department of English.
